ABSTRACT
When I was young, my family had the pleasant custom of going at least once a year to Chicago, which in those days was to me a place of great excitement and pleasure. There was the Field Museum on the lakefront, where one could spend days and weeks exploring the past. There was the Rosenwald Museum, brooding in a park close to the University of Chicago’s sprawling campus. There one could see a wide-angled picture of the world’s technological development, explore a coal mine beneath the city’s streets or see a grisly display of human anatomy in the medical section. But there was one palace of pleasure to which I was always most eager to go. On the fourth floor of the elegant Marshall Field store at the corner of Randolph Street and State Street was to be found what was called the bookstore which to my young heart represented a clear reflection of heaven. It is today, in this modern age, not quite the same, being a book department of much more mundane nature. But in those other days, it presented to the wide-eyed wonder of a young boy a vast and shining array of all the wisdom, all the literary graces, all the crescendos and nuances of the symphonies of reading that the world could supply. And this was not all. It was staffed by men and women who were blessed with a miraculous capacity for knowing when a person wanted only to be left alone to pore over the tables, to browse along the weighted shelves and for knowing, too, exactly when to come to the visitor’s assistance. I got to know two or three of those bookish people very well, and on each visit would seek one of them out for a half-hour’s joyous conversation, a half-hour from which I inevitably emerged with an armful of books.
